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TAMK International

‘Competence equals Capacity’– Cross-border collaboration to support growth of AV companies

— Anna-Maria Balk

The audiovisual (AV) sector, particularly the Film and TV Industry in Finland and Sweden, faces challenges in growth due to a lack of local, regional, and national production resources. This includes staff, teams, skills, equipment, facilities, and international networks. To address these challenges, a cross-border collaboration between Finland, Sweden, Estonia, and Latvia entitled Growth for FINSWE Film and TV Companies (AV–Growth ) will run from 2024 to 2027.

At the project’s kickoff meeting in Mediapolis Tampere, the partners discussed about the importance of adapting to current challenges and seizing growth opportunities. Managing Director Charlotte Gimfalk from Yrkesnämnden for film och tv emphasised how competence is link to capacity-building within the AV industry. Currently, there is a lack of standardized qualifications in the field and an urgent need for skills validation, which also has a negative impact on creating policy-initiatives to support AV businesses.  

Besides up-scaling the skills of AV sector professionals, Film Tampere’s programme director Fanny Heinonen raised the importance of focusing on companies to elevate the level of competence within the AV industry. This is also strongly linked to the role of business leadership and effective management in driving success, which are in the core of the AV-Growth project.

Head of Competence Area, Timo Kivikangas from School of Media and Arts (Tampere University of Applied Sciences) highlighted, that there is a lot of unexplored potential in cross-border collaboration to respond to these issues. The newly established Finnish-Swedish collaboration within the project’s framework enable responding together to practical challenges related to large-scale AV productions and to pilot new models with students.

Finally, Project lead Juha Suonpää from Applied Research Center concluded that current AV industry climate is stormy, but yet opportunistic; the project can help AV companies to become more resilient with a strong adaptability and collaboration skills to navigate the current situation in the industry to seize new opportunities for growth.

Text: Maria Salomaa
Image: Created using AI by OpenAI’s DALL-E tool.

AV- Growth project (2024-2027)
The objective of the project is to scale up growth for AV-sector companies, with a focus on workshops, mentoring, and implementing new growth tools. A joint cross-border AV production model is developed to support scaling up, aiming to enhance the availability of production resources, develop methods and skills, and offer services for larger markets.

Key outputs include the execution of the AV-Growth program, implementation of new growth tools for cross-border productions, and the development of a joint cross-border AV production model and pilot production. These efforts aim to attract investment, develop new business models, and increase the profitability of productions. The approach is unique in its combination of cross-border collaboration, matchmaking, mentoring, and the use of digital competence badges for skills standardization in Film and TV Industry.


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